Three days after the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, investigations are underway into the gunman Aaron Alexis’s deadly rampage that left 12 people dead. Lawmakers are questioning how Alexis maintained a security clearance at the base despite a history of violent episodes and mental illness. But there is little momentum on Capitol Hill to enact any new gun-control laws. "We are at a defining point in America: What kind of society are we going to be?,” asks Tom Diaz, author of "The Last Gun: How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans and What It Will Take to Stop It." Diaz is a former member of the National Rifle Association and is a gun enthusiast.

In the wake of the mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard that left 12 people dead, dozens of gun-control activists, many from the Newtown Action Alliance, convened on Capitol Hill Wednesday to try to revive a bill that would expand federal background checks of gun buyers. Speakers included Shundra Robinson, whose 18-year-old son Deno Wooldridge was shot dead on his grandmother’s front porch in Chicago nearly three years ago. "We’ve got to go home to empty rooms because our children’s lives were taken away by people who should not have had guns anyways," Robinson testified. "It’s beyond an epidemic. This is genocide in America." Robinson joins us from Chicago where she serves as an anti-violence activist and an evangelist with Radical End Time Ministries International.

Two years after the Occupy Wall Street movement shifted the conversation on economic inequality, we look at its origins in New York City’s Zuccotti Park and its continued legacy in a number of different groups active today. We speak with Nicole Carty, actions coordinator with The Other 98% and a facilitator of general assemblies and spokescouncil meetings during Occupy, where she was a member of the Occupy People of Color Caucus. Also joining us is Nathan Schneider, editor of the website Waging Nonviolence and a longtime chronicler of the Occupy movement for Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times and The Catholic Worker. Scheider’s new book, "Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse," chronicles Occupy’s first year.

Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan — What price would you pay not to kill another human being? At what point would you commit the offenses allegedly perpetrated by Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was charged Wednesday with desertion and “misbehavior before an enemy?”